Xenotropic Systems

The Beginning

The day started out with goodbyes, and the final views of Corvallis for a few months at least. I decided to push through to Sweet Home with the fuel I had on board, and that would give me a nice break before the stress of the mountains. Everything seemed to be performing okay on the motorcycle, and I started gathering some fuel statistics as well using MPG on my iPhone. It’s actually a cool little app. I talked to a fellow motorcyclist in the gas station in Sweet Home for a bit. He was really interested in my “crotch rocket” and was apparently thinking about getting one in addition to his cruiser.

Unlike the last time Dylan and I were there, the Cascades were awesome today. It was sunny, and dry. The morning started out a little nippy, but I elected to go without any rain liner or insulation, and I think it was the right choice. Things warmed up, and the forest was at its best. I got a pretty clean run at Highway 20, and was able to pass up cars fairly quickly after getting behind them. They seem to have paved over the gravel spots that were there for a few years, which makes it a little better for motorcycles. The paving job isn’t the best, so you can’t go barreling into those corners like you normally would.

I saw another couple of BMWs at the gas station in Bend. They were headed back to Colorado after a trip they took to British Columbia. I almost had a disaster with the TomTom when near Black Butte Ranch I noticed it had completely fallen off the mount and was hanging by the power cord. It turned out that it needed a little more cutting in Bend to make sure the plug fully clears the mounting. After that it stayed put all day. Unfortunately, even with my makeshift sunshade on, it’s not really completely visible when riding. I can cup my hand over it and see well enough to get the data I want though. It would be so much cooler if it had a nice bright screen like the iPhone.

I expected that the trip to Burns would be dry and hot, but amazingly enough, I got rained on. I decided to grit it out and just get a little wet. It kept things cool, and wasn’t a bad choice at all. There was some construction along the way, and I had to wait for a pilot car.

McDonalds was lunchtime for me, since I wanted to get back on the road quickly to preserve some time for other things. It hit the spot, and I was out of Burns after some gas in the tank. Crane was a short hop from there, and it was nice to hang out with Grandma for an hour or so. I got to stretch my legs and rest up for the remaining 200 miles or so. Grandma seemed to be doing well, and recovering nicely from her dental work. She seemed happy to see me.

I really drove had out of Crane, flogging the bike along at 75-80 mph. This made some really good time, except when I had to wait for a herd of cattle to cross the road. I made my next stop in McDermott to grab the final gas break. The wind was kicking up a little when I was filling up, and it seemed some weather was on the way. Around 30 miles out I got caught up in it. Again, I decided not to do any rain gear, which was probably fine. The major problem was that there was terrible wind. It was whipping sagebrush across the roadway which I was hoping not to get caught up in. Worse was that I had to suck down to the bike to and lean into it to try to not get blown off the road. It let up after a while and I found a small sliver of opportunity to make the rest of the way into Winnemucca. Shortly after I arrived at Aunt Sue’s house, the sky opened up and started dumping, complete with thunder and lightning. It’s continuing to do so tonight, and we’re thinking that a fire may have been started somewhere since there is a burning smell in the air.

Dinner was some cheeseburgers and the meat was really good. I helped Aunt Sue with her computer issues, and got her Macs up and running again. We did some teaching on how to do a few things on the computer, and she seems eager to try some stuff out. I got her signed up for AIM so that we can try to do any remote debugging that needs to happen, and that should allow her to talk to some folk too. She was thinking it might be good for Grandma since she just inherited Mom’s old 12″ PowerBook. We’ll have to see if we can get Grandma Internet service first. They’re CenturyTel out there, so I’m thinking some DSL services might be available (even though AT&T cellular service is non-existent in Crane).

Weather seems to be okay for tomorrow, and I don’t see an road closures along the way from Nevada DOT.

Total Fuel Cost: $55.35
Estimated Fuel Cost: $49.41
12.02% over fuel budget

Today was the last day in Corvallis and there was lots of preparation to accomplish. I changed the oil on the bike on Saturday, and still had it opened up to do a few last minute things on it. The big pain about doing an oil change on the VFR is that the right side faring has to come off in order to access the oil drain plug. But, this also allowed me the opportunity to replace out the knob for the heated vest, and attempt to solder up the switch for the heated grips.

I have done a lot of electrical work on the bike to get the many accessories I like to run working. I like having lots of technology on the bike for some reason. I ended up installing a setup where I have a couple of cigarette lighter sockets on a cord that goes into my tank bag. This allows me to have the TH-D7A and GPS III hooked up to bike power. I have an aftermarket fuseblock that I bought a couple of years ago that I can wire all of this into. Additionally, I put another cigarette lighter socket by the tail light that accepts the adapter for the TomTom navigation system. Originally I wanted to solder wiring directly to the TomTom 12V adapter so that I could seal it up a little tighter. Unfortunately, the soldering facilities that Dad has just aren’t really up to the job. I ended up having to buy a “universal” adapter from Radio Shack to fit the TomTom. It ended up being designed for the older One series, and it didn’t fit quite right into my One 130. A little work with my knife cutting off some excess plastic got it to fit in the socket. Along with the RAM mounting equipment, it makes a pretty good setup. The major problem with the TomTom is that under full sunlight, the display is fairly worthless. On their “Rider” series, there is a large sunshade that solves this. I had to whip up my own out of some velcro squares and the cardboard from a FedEx envelope. We’ll see how it performs.

Even though I struggled with the heated grips, they still aren’t fully operational. It turns out that the major problem with the control panel that I have on the VFR is the LEDs I decided to install. I think I need to go with some sort of marine LED indicators because the ones I have ended up corroding. I took the indicator LED out of the circuit for the grips, and soldered it directly to the switch. This worked before I had the faring put back on the bike, but it started to default to the always on position when it was fully assembled. I ended up pulling the fuse. I’m not sure if I’ll need them anyways. There’s not really any danger of killing the battery because the power is switched to the bike’s ignition. If it’s not on, you won’t get any heat. This seems to indicate that the switch, like the LEDs, isn’t as waterproof as I’d like. I’ll have to see if I can find some alternatives that look good and fit the holes I’ve drilled.

The Givi bags seem to mount up and work well. I like the way they’re packing up in general, but I’m having to get used to how wide they make the back of the bike. It would have been nice to have the E52 Maxia, but I ran into time constraints. I’m ending up shipping some of my stuff home instead of bringing it on the bike. This is okay, since it’s really not stuff I’ll need on the ride anyhow. I think I acquired a little more stuff while I was in Corvallis than I anticipated (including a full suit).

My boots weren’t in as good a shape as I had hoped. During one of my recent rides, the heel of one of them came unglued and wasn’t doing so well. Again, if I were rich I’d buy another set of them. These Alpinestars are like eight years old, and were involved in the crash of the original Pikachu. I have been having some weird issues with having sore heels while I’m on the bike, and I think it’s related to the shape of my boots. I repaired the problem one with some shoe goo, and put some of the “gellin’” insoles in them for good measure. I hope they’ll perform well on this trip.

I’ve always wanted to have some Gatorade rather than straight water in my Camelbak, but it tends to encourage the growth of unwanted organisms when you have sugary drinks in your hydration system. Recently I found that Camelbak actually has some sugar-free tablets that you dissolve in your reservoir that solve these issues. I couldn’t find any at Peak Sports in town, but I did find an alternative. More comments on how they perform when I get down the road a ways. I also have my typical box of power bars sitting in the tank bag for quick snacks.

After I fitted the bags, Mom ended up tipping over the bike by hitting the bags with the yard waste container. It knocked out the glue job that Steve and I did a few years ago when I was coming through Colorado Springs and had a problem. It also bent the brake lever. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a brake lever in time because it was on backorder for some reason. Fortunately, I was able to get a new tail light. This is the first time it’s had one since like 2003, so while it’s irritating that Mom dumped my bike, at least I got a tail light out of the deal.

We had a small get together of the family here at Mom and Dad’s house to make sure I could see everyone before I left. Dad bar-b-qued stuff on the Traeger, and it was excellent as usual. Folks hung out for a while, and it was nice to see the immediate family before I had to get out of town.

So, everything is as prepared as it gets, but I’m still up at 2:30 a.m. worrying about things. I have this persistent fear that I’ll become stranded out in the middle of the desert in Eastern Oregon or Nevada in the oppressive heat. The bike has been purring along as well as I could ask it to all summer, so I don’t think it’s going to fail me, but you never know.

It looks like the cash flow just won’t be enough to do the permanent on-bike APRS setup with the stuff from Byonics, so I’ll have to use my venerable Kenwood TH-D7A and Garmin GPS III. They worked well enough last time, except that I had to run the GPS on battery power. I remedied that last year before my trip to Massachusetts when I bought a cable that had both serial data and a 12V cigarette lighter on it. I think what I’ll do is construct something that hooks up to the fuse block and comes out between the seat and the tank. I can put a little quick release on it, and have a 3-socket cigarette lighter connector that will sit in my tank bag. I think this will work out okay and provide tracking on the trip. Unfortunately, the TH-D7A is only 6W vs. the 10W from the Byonics unit.

I’ll have to pick up a 12V cigarette adapter for the TH-D7A (PG-3J) because my original one was destroyed on the trip in 2005. I left it unplugged for a while, and the cord fell into the chain and got shredded. It should be relatively cheap through Ham Radio Outlet.

I already tested the setup, and it seems as if people are receiving me. You can check out the current location at http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/find.cgi?call=NH6Z-10.

Here’s a set of goggle maps for the travel days of the trip. This should be the hops I’ll make across the country to make may way back to Massachusetts It’s a 9 day trip without layovers, but with the planned rest points, it adds another 7 days. The total 16 day trip means that if I’m going to be back by my desired date of August, 8, the last day of departure can be Monday, July 23. The drop dead date is Wednesday, July 30 for riding straight through.

I’m trying to get some sort of APRS setup running by then. If nothing else, I can bike power my TH-D7A and Garmin GPS III combo, but it’s really not optimal for what I want to do. I’m trying to get these:

Micro-Trak 8000 FA
Byonics GPS2

And semi-permanently mount them to the bike in a modified cowl. I’m not sure that I’ll get that far though, it’s a bit of work and ordering to get the setup done. You should be able to track where I am at using URL.

Day 1 (Mon, Jul 21) - Corvallis, OR to Winnemucca, NV (No Layover):
481 mi - 9 hours 44 minutes
Average Fuel Price: $4.623
Estimated Fuel Cost: $49.41

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Day 2 (Tue, Jul 22) - Winnemucca, NV to Mesquite, NV (2 day layover):
532 mi - 9 hours 43 minutes
Average Fuel Price: $4.647
Estimated Fuel Cost: $54.94

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Day 3 (Fri, Jul 25) - Mesquite, NV to Bayfield, CO (2 day layover):
534 mi - 9 hours 56 minutes
Average Fuel Price: $4.524
Estimated Fuel Cost: $53.68

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Day 4 (Mon, Jul 28) - Bayfield, CO to Denver, CO (2 day layover):
324 mi - 6 hours 25 minutes
Average Fuel Price: $4.473
Estimated Fuel Cost: $32.21

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Day 5 (Thu, Jul 31) - Denver CO to St Joseph, MO (no layover):
562 mi - 10 hours 5 minutes
Average Fuel Price: $4.289
Estimated Fuel Cost: $53.56

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Day 6 (Fri, Aug 1) - St. Joseph, MO to Bloomington, IN (no layover):
503 mi - 11 hours 18 minutes
Average Fuel Price: $4.278
Estimated Fuel Cost: $47.82

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Day 7 (Sat, Aug 2) - Bloomington, IN to Akron, OH (1 day layover):
379 mi - 9 hours 17 minutes
Average Fuel Price: $4.426
Estimated Fuel Cost: $37.28

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Day 8 (Mon, Aug 4) - Akron, OH to Hancock, NY (no layover):
404 mi - 8 hours 56 min
Average Fuel Price: $4.513
Estimated Fuel Cost: $40.52

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Day 9 (Tue, Aug 5) - Hancock, NY to Springfield, MA:
198 mi - 4 hours 59 minutes
Average Fuel Price: $4.616
Estimated Fuel Cost: $20.31

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While I was home for Christmas I decided it was time to upgrade Tsunami to the next generation. For a number of years now, I’ve had the luxury of having a colocated server to catch my mail, provide a home for my web space, and other such things. Tsunami has provided this service for me, and has had a home at both Peak and Kattare.

Since I am essentially a guest at Kattare, I decided that it might be a good idea to reduce the footprint of Tsunami. Before I was running an AMD Athlon XP based system in a 4U generic rack mount case. This was rather large for the things I was running. The first thing that came to my mind was the possibility of moving to a Mac Mini instead. It had a lot of attributes that were very attractive. It’s small. It has a fairly powerful Intel Core 2 Duo processor in it. The amount of memory it can take is quite sufficient for a small server. The price was also decent, considering my student discount for such a thing.

I ended up picking up one at the University of Oregon Bookstore in Eugene. It turned out that they had a floor model that they were getting rid of, and were giving an additional $100 off the price. This was a really good deal since I ended up paying like $400 for the thing. Not a bad price for a server with a 1.83 GHz dual core with 1Gb of memory. The disk is a little small, and it’s the slow laptop sized drives, but for the traffic that Tsunami typically runs, it’s not a big deal. I’m planning on throwing an additional gig of memory in it since it’s fairly cheap, and adding some external USB 2.0 or Firewire storage to it (I want to see if I can pick up a MiniStack from NewerTech). There was a small problem in getting it since I forgot my UO ID in Springfield, and they didn’t want to really accept my WNEC ID. They ended up calling Apple to make sure I wasn’t trying to scam them. It’s surprising that they had to run this through their Apple rep, and it took a couple of days to clear. I would imagine that Apple would have things in good enough order that there would be a toll-free number, or a web page to consult for this stuff. The Apple Store never really has an issue with my purchases.

Once I got the hardware figured out, I had a decision to make regarding software. The AMD based Tsunami was running Gentoo Linux, and I’ve used it for a long time on my servers (ever since I switched from FreeBSD about five years ago). Gentoo worked fine, and the security updates were fairly good on it. The install process is necessarily complex since Gentoo is targeted towards a “roll your own” mentality. My problem is that I’ve become very lazy in my old age, and I’m getting tired of tinkering with things quite so much. With law school going on, and having to do work for Kattare, I don’t have the time or inclination to be fixing my server all the time. Especially when my e-mail is so important to me. While Gentoo was pretty stable and such, it required some intricate futzing to make work correctly all the time. I realized that MacOS X Server was very similar to my setup on Gentoo. The e-mail that ships with MacOS was in essence the same as what I was running on Gentoo: Postfix for an MTA, Cyrus IMAPd for a store, and a LDAP store for users. What was attractive is that there were some nice clicky buttons to set up all of the options for e-mail. Spam filtering with SpamAssassin was a check box in Server Administrator. Adding users was as easy as slamming in them into Workgroup Manager. Likewise, Apache server was doing the web duties for both MacOS and Gentoo. And, again, the ease of setting up Apache on MacOS was impressive.

So, I decided that I’d try out MacOS to see if I could make it work for my server. So far, it works fairly well. The nice thing about most of the stuff is that if you don’t like the choices that Server Manager gives you, you can always ditch it and edit the files directly. I’ve been resisting doing that for various reasons, but, honestly, the only thing I can think of that I’m missing is the ability to add SPF records to my DNS server. I have some security concerns with the granularity of the clicky buttons in the Apache configuration, but it’s certainly not a show stopper. The stability of the machine has been comparable to my Gentoo server in every way.

One of the huge advantages that I like about running MacOS instead is the ability to VNC in and get a standard MacOS interface. It allows me to install graphical programs that I’d normally use on my workstation. I ran into some problems getting it working 100%. The big issue is with Apple’s LDAP implementation: Open Directory. In the default configuration, Open Directory users are not able to log in via VNC. Unfortunately, the iCal Server (which is pretty nice) requires that its users be in the directory, and not as local users. After doing a lot of research, I learned that the only way to really get OD users to authenticate with VNC is to change the settings via Apple Remote Desktop 3.0. This was kind of an annoyance, but once I discovered the trick, wasn’t too much of a problem to set up.

I’ve also had some issues with runaway processes. Once it seemed like it was Clam Antivirus (which is used in the E-Mail server), and the other, sshd. I’ll be watching things a little more closely to see why these things were going crazy. As usual with UNIX based stuff, killing off the processes solved the problems without a reboot of the entire machine.

Another nice thing I found by accident with the box is the firewalling. It turns out that MacOS X has a daemon that runs and watches the authentication logs to see if there’s any authentication failures. When it finds excessive amounts, it will throw that IP address in the firewall for a period of time. This shipped on by default, and I didn’t have to do anything to set it up. This is really smart, and impresses me a lot. If you’re interested, check out emond and afctl.

I’ll have more updates about what I encounter a they come up.